The Sister

by Poppy Adams

  It’s been a long time since I’ve had the chance to examine a fresh collection. The children who made me this offering have no idea of the delightful distraction they have given me on this particular Monday morning. They will be assuming, perhaps, that because I have bred moths (even, perhaps, bred some of these moths’ forefathers), nurtured their pupae in my cellar and witnessed their first flight in my attic, to discover them half mutilated on my doorstep would make me recoil in horror. They are wrong, of course, for we naturalists strive for the greater proliferation of the entire lepidoptera genera, not for the survival of individuals. The children may be surprised to know how many moths I’ve gassed and pinned; how many caterpillars I’ve rolled, still alive, to squeeze out their insides, reinflating them with wood chip to give them structure; how many peaceful cocoons I’ve dug up and cut open from under the roots of poplars, apples and crack willows. But all of this for a scientific cause, for a greater understanding of and insight into a little-known insect.

  3:05 p.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

  I am inching along Vivien’s landing, on the other side of the double doors, still in my nightgown and bed socks, and I can feel the pressure of the whole unfamiliar space crowding in on me. I have spent much of the day finding the courage to be here, to check on Vivien myself.

  I can see that her door is wide open and I stop on the landing outside it. From this angle I can’t see her, but I can see a slice of her room: the end of her bed and the far corner. Shoes and slippers are stacked up on top of each other in the corner. Next to them I see a little basket and a rug, which I presume are for Simon, and a large plastic Mother and Child attached to an electric cord, which makes me wonder if it lights up or preaches when it’s plugged in. Lifting my gaze to a shelf on the wall, I see a bookstand—the seat of an ugly green marble toad—and next to that, to my delight, an ornate little carriage clock. I’ll be happy to have that clock, I think. You can never have enough clocks. Then I admonish myself for the inappropriate thought outside a dead woman’s room. The clock is at an oblique angle, so I have to move closer to the door frame and peer in for several seconds to read the time. Ten to four. I check it against my wristwatch—much too fast. I tut.

  “Ginny, come in.”

  A surge of terror. My heart thuds within its cage, and I freeze—right there by the door. The marble toad stares mockingly at me. Oh, my God, she’s not dead! She didn’t drink her milk after all. Every part of me is tight with a fear I’ve never known before. I had been utterly convinced she was dead. Is this her ghost talking? I can’t concentrate enough to think. Am I relieved or frustrated? I had thought I couldn’t bear to see her dead but to see her alive when I think she’s dead feels far worse.

  “Ginny,” she says again, weakly, “are you there?”

  So she’s guessing. Silently I shift backwards, towards the landing’s double doors, out of sight of the toad. I’m going to leave her. I don’t want to confront her. I’m going to creep away quietly and she’ll never know for sure that I was really here.

  “I know you’re there,” she whispers. She’s bluffing, of course….

  “Ginny, I know you’re just outside my door. Ginny?” I’m caught. I can’t expose myself now or it would be admitting that I’ve been hiding from her for the past few minutes. But I can’t bring myself to walk away either because now I know she knows I’m here. I lean my head against the landing wall, the other side of her room, defeated. Trapped.

  “Look, you don’t have to come in. Stay there and listen if you want,” she continues, as if she knows my every thought and fear. “But please listen. This is very important.”

  I am very still. I am very listening.

  “Ginny, I’m ill. I think I’m dying. I need you to get me a doctor.”

  Oh, my God, she did drink the milk, or, rather, she could have drunk the milk. But, equally, she could be genuinely ill, a torturous coincidence that no one would ever need know about.

  No, I can’t get a doctor. I can have someone find her dead, but not ill. Dead old ladies are commended for their contribution in life, laid to rest and, along with their secrets, swallowed forever by the earth. But ill old ladies are investigated until the poison coursing through their bodies is hunted down. And that, as you can imagine, would get me into a lot of trouble. My head is spinning. I want to sit down and tabulate my options. I can’t control them flying about in my head: I need to pull them together on a page and consider them methodically, one by one, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve been leaning my head against the wall of the landing as I listened, and now I put the palm of my right hand up—flat—just a couple of inches in front of my face so I can stare at it. I find that sometimes this helps me focus my concentration, helps draw it back to me rather than flying off, spiraling out of control.

  “Ginny, I know this isn’t easy for you. I understand that.” A few days ago I would have taken comfort in the way she seems to know me inside out, but now I hate it. “But if you go to Eileen’s she will…” I can hear the struggle in her voice as she tries to summon energy. “Ginny, for me…please,” she begs finally.

  I am looking at the multitude of crisscrossing lines on the palm of my right hand and the dry calluses on the knobbles at the base of my fingers. As I begin to close the hand, bending it in the middle and curling my deformed fingers, I can see the lines fold in on themselves, making deeper and deeper crevices, until my hand is a fist. Then I notice lines that have not grown out of any folds of a fist—like the ones that run lengthways along the fingers—but have simply matured from a gradual desiccation of the skin.

  I want to tell you something now, while we’re in this awful predicament outside Vivien’s room: all my life, it seems, I have sacrificed my own will for those around me. Not that I’ve offered much resistance and not that I haven’t wanted to. But I think you’ll agree that I fall into that category of people who prefer to give than to get, who feel better about themselves when they’ve been helping others and derive satisfaction from knowing that some of their own suffering has directly aided someone else’s, indeed someone they love’s, happiness. But I think even people like us have to believe that, just once or twice in our lives, our love is appreciated, perhaps even reciprocated.

  “A doctor…Ginny?”

  I open my fist sharply, decisively, last night’s new persona coming to the fore. The range of movement in my knuckles is impressive now. It’s good to exercise arthritic joints, keep them loose so they don’t seize up. I look at Vivien’s door through the gap between my fingers.

  “Okay,” I say gently.

  I leave the landing, go downstairs and open the front door. I have been forced, for what seems like the first time in my entire life, to make an active decision, a choice. A choice that will have an irreversible impact on the future.

  I give myself time for one deep breath of honeysuckle, then close the front door, loudly, so Vivien will hear it upstairs. I go into the library, open the drinks cabinet and find the black tin of potassium cyanide, KCN, behind a sticky bottle of vermouth, where I hid it last night. I’m half surprised to find it there, to have confirmation of my actions during the moonlit hours. I reach to the shelf above for a glass and measure in half a teaspoon of the powder, snapping closed the lid and replacing it behind the vermouth. I suppose this is what is meant by premeditated—the calm and considered preparation of death. But I feel released, unshackled. For the first time ever I am not only in control of my life, I am taking control of the future. For once I am causing an event to happen. Yet at the same time another force is thrusting me forward, an overwhelming one that, to my surprise, makes each action follow the last as if I am paralyzed and looking down on myself with horror.

  I am impassive and incurious as I continue. It’s the scientist in me, I know. You learn early on, as a scientist, not to trust your feelings and to rise above any unqualified instinct or emotion. All calculations must be backed up with undeniable evidence and absolute qualified conclusions.


  It feels no different from making the tea, an everyday practical occurrence. Murder. I take no pleasure in it, yet feel no shame, no anxiety. But this time there is no pretending that I am leaving it up to chance. I accept fully what I am doing. This time it is no different from loading a gun and shooting someone between the eyes, or cracking a lead weight across their skull, and rather than being appalled by myself, I’m feeling strangely empowered, released from the forces that I have, so far, allowed to dictate my life. This time it is me, it is my will. I am in control.

  I think I’m in control and yet, perhaps, I have no choice. I cannot help the way the events of my life and those of the past three days have worked on my inherent and coded characteristics to bring me to this unpleasant outcome. As you must know, once a domino is pushed, the motion is started and, as long as the others are lined up one after another with the correct spacing, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them. It is the consequence of my lifetime experiences on the character that I was given. From that viewpoint, it cannot be called premeditated. It is as strictly governed as a mathematical equation. It is the result of

  me + Vivi falling off the bell tower + taunting at school + Maud’s sherry drinking + the existence of poison in the house…

  I feel like the caterpillar that we think is making a choice when he eats or pupates but, in actual fact, is not. He’s completely ruled by molecular forms of influence acting on the base components of a moth. Likewise, perhaps I have become a killer through circumstances acting on my biological makeup. Which means, of course, that none of this is my fault and that it’s all out of my hands.

  I like to think that, for once, I am in control of my actions, but I also like to know that I am not.

  I carry the glass to the front door. Once again I open and close the door loudly, as if I’ve just returned to the house. Then I go to the kitchen and turn on the tap. The cold water pipes start up their chorus of banging and thudding, shaking awake the rest of the house. I fill the glass halfway with water, swirling it gently to dissolve the poison, and I am reminded of the faint aroma it releases, a bitter tinge of almond. I carry it through the hall, past Jake the pig, up the stairs, past the huge stained-glass window, slow and steady, missing the second from last stair, which squeaks, and reach the landing.

  I stop at the top as an image of Vivien’s coffin passes me, carried by unknown men in black, helping her on her last journey down these stairs and out of Bulburrow. It is a final call for caution, to make sure that this is how I really want to change the future. But I am now certain I have no choice: I am the puppet of myself.

  I step aside to make way for the procession and continue across the landing, through the double doors and onto Vivien’s landing. I’m concentrating, blocking out everything but the Method that the palm of my hand has helped me to devise. It is so easy. Thank you, Maud. After all, it was she who had taught me how to substitute for my lack of natural strength, she who had taught me how to believe in myself. What would she say, do you suppose, one daughter killing the other? Is she looking at me now from her heaven and taking full responsibility for my actions, as she always did?

  As I enter the room Vivien’s clock says fourteen minutes past four. Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t know yet that I have entered. I can now see the rest of the room, which had been out of view from my listening post on the landing. It is such an onslaught of color and clutter that my eyes wander for too long on the accessories before I look at Vivien. She has hung fairy lights round the picture rail and stuck photos of herself with people I don’t recognize on the wall above her bed. A mirror has more photos jammed in its frame, and on the other side of her bed, on the floor, there are three tea-stained mugs and a dirty plate. Above this, four nails have been banged into the wall as hooks and clothes slung over them. A small dressing table is covered with a disarray of bottles—perfume, face creams and other unguents—without a hint of order to any of it. One or two items have fallen off while a tin of talc hangs over the edge on its side, having coughed some of its contents onto the floor through the holes in its lid. It taunts me, the way it lies teetering, and I am overcome with an unbearable desire to push it back on. With a great effort of will I ignore its precariousness and instead summon myself to concentrate on the matter at hand. I focus on Vivien.

  Her eyes are now flickering open and shut. She is trying to keep them directed, but they race peevishly this way and that within their sockets. Her right hand is lying palm up on the bedcover, quite close to me, and when she opens and closes it, grabbing at the air, I realize it is an invitation for me to hold it. I don’t want to be part of a last-minute fingertip reconciliation, but I oblige her handhold anyway, like swallowing a mouthful of something disgusting because soon you know it will all be over.

  “The doctor’s on his way,” I lie. “Eileen is waiting for him and will bring him up.” She squeezes my hand. I stare at her clock: method, results, conclusions, method, results, conclusions. Tick, tock, tick. The second hand is about to pass Go, pushing the minute hand to half past four by this clock, tick, tock, four, three, two, one, Go. It’s four-thirty in the afternoon of 27 April.

  “He says you must drink some water. That’s very important, he says. It’ll make you feel better. Can you sit up?”

  Vivien’s eyes are now open, not fully, but open, and she manages to shift herself a little way up the bed so that her head is more upright on her pillow. I wonder vaguely, as she gulps thankfully at the water, whether if I’d had it in me to kill the flies in Lower 5B when I was thirteen, I might not now have it in me to kill my sister at seventy.

  I put the glass on the floor beside the bed. Vivien’s eyes stare blankly above her. Her lips move, drinking the air like a fish out of water, and she beats her arm on the bed, just once. I wonder, with sudden curiosity, if I’m about to feel something like a life force leaving her body as she dies, but I don’t. Her body starts to convulse, wracking violently, as if another being is trying to expel itself through her skin. I don’t mind watching her. I know she’s not feeling this. She’s already dead. But I’ll tell you something—as I watch the involuntary twitches of a poisoned body, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit I find it interesting, from a purely scientific point of view, of course.

  I’ll tell you more about it, if you like. Potassium cyanide is what’s called a synaptic blocker poison. It blocks the tiny electrical impulses with which our nervous system functions, at the synapses, the communication junctions between nerves. At a molecular level the poison is a compound that can fit into the same receptor sites that the synaptic messenger compounds would normally lock into, thereby inhibiting them doing their job and preventing any signals being passed along the nerves. In other words, the body is paralyzed within seconds, as long as you administer enough to block the receptor sites before the body can metabolize and excrete the poison. It’s a race between the kidneys’ toxin-removal efficiency and the potency of the poison.

  Vivien is still now and I am stroking her hair because—I don’t know if you will understand this—I still love her. I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the same parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her color, her disruption and disorder, her humor and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn’t me. Now that she is dead, I can already feel the love overriding the hatred once more. Besides our moment of happiness on the porch when Vivien first came home on Friday, these are the next best few minutes I’ve had with her. She should have stayed away. Why did she come home? I wonder. I know so little about her.

  I hear a car advancing up the drive and, glancing through the window, I am surprised to see it’s a police car.

  Chapter 22

  PC Bolt and Inspector Piggott

  The policeman steps out of the car onto the drive as I walk towards him. My new self had little trouble in opening the front door, and I’m feeling far less threatened as I walk up to him than I would have felt yesterday with any other visitor. The sun catches his
windscreen, dazzling me. The sky is a watery blue and I can smell honeysuckle, carried to me on the breeze.

  “Vivien Morris?” he says, from afar, and I think of Vivien, her body ratcheting her life from itself. “I’m PC Bolt, from the Beaminster station. Sorry, did I get you out of bed?” he says, looking at my nightgown, then the open-toed slippers on my feet.

  PC Bolt looks about nineteen. He’s standing by his car, leaning on the open door, which makes a barrier between us, like a desk.

  “No,” I say, but I’m trying hard to work out how and why he’s here, how on earth he found out so quickly that I’ve poisoned my sister. For a moment I imagine he has a special insight that allows him to detect any injustices being carried out within the county.

  “There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” he says, smiling. “It’s what we call a courtesy call.” My sense of relief gives way to light-headedness and I have to steady myself. I remember I’ve not eaten today. Once my routine goes, I forget to do things like eat.

  “Oh, and also,” he continues flippantly, “we had a very excited telephone call from a”—he takes a flip-pad from his breast pocket and consults it—“from an Eileen Turner, who lives at Willow Cottage. She was frantic, saying you were supposed to be having tea with her this afternoon at four and as it’s now, well, long gone…”